The Last Lion
altogether absorbing popular biography... The heroic Churchill is in these pages, but so is the little boy writing forlorn letters to the father who all but ignored him.”—People When Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace in 1874, Imperial Britain stood at the splendid pinnacle of her power. Yet within a few years the Empire would hover on the brink of catastrophe. Against this backdrop, a remarkable man began to build his legacy. From master biographer William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory reveals the first fifty-eight years of the life of an adventurer, aristocrat, soldier, and statesman whose courageous leadership guided the destiny of his darkly troubled times—and who is remembered as one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. Praise for The Last Lion: Visions of Glory “Absolutely magnificent... a delight to read... one of those books you devour line by line and word by word and finally hate to see end.”—Russell Baker “Bedazzling.”—Newsweek “Manchester has read further, thought harder, and told with considerable verve what is mesmerizing in [Churchill’s] drama.... One cannot do better than this book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Superb... [Manchester] pulls together the multitudinous facets of one of the richest lives ever to be chronicled.... Churchill and Manchester were clearly made for each other.”—Chicago Tribune “A vivid, thoroughly detailed biography of the Winston Churchill nobody knows.”—Boston Herald “Adds a grand dimension...
Stats for nerds
11recommend
15mentions
14people
2009–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've met Steve on a number of occasions, smart guy. I also work in this space and have definitely read a lot of the same books he has, along with many of his excellent articles. Alas, I'm pretty sure he would never read my articles, unless he got cancer, which I hope he doesn't.
I do want to pick up where he left off: the interface between the US and China, and specifically look at how China has invested. I've spent some effort on this forum making the point that our system has left some critical vulnerabilities that the Chinese have leveraged, e.g. (1,2).
It's worth understanding that Xi Jinping has been working hard on this problem set, along with his predecessors and many around him for a long time. To really understand his whole-of-economy approach, I highly recommend Hank Paulson's Dealing with China (3). He has and maintains a narrative of literally going from a boy in a cave to the leader of the largest nation on Earth. Much like the narrative arc Churchill maintained for himself (the Prof Blank mentions), Xi would see science as a component of the tapestry, but not the whole story.
Xi is also using the Belt and Road Initiative for massive effect, see the maps in (4). The US has started to pay attention with renewed investments in the region, e.g. (5) but Xi has a decade head start and a political base that could be characterized as relatively stable compared to the current US administration.
As my time is limited, I'm appending a reading list at the end for those interested (6 to end). Suffice to say, yes this is how we became a science superpower. But it ignores how our parochial incentives and belief in American exceptionalism morphed in the American narcissism (14) this is very likely to doom the American experiment without significant effort on the part of the American population to come together. Unfortunately, I fear the fracturing of the population is too far gone to remediate without major conflict, but major conflict in the present setting is likely far more serious than we could survive as a nation.
As a final thought, the major conflict is obviously nuclear war. We will not survive that as a nation. Thus the Prisoner's Dilemma. We are all prisoners on Earth. Even Musk's species-level escape is far from escape. The physics of deep space travel or even intra-solar-system travel just don't work out in our favor. So, how do you survive the Prisoner's Dilemma? The math answer is "there are a lot of complicated answers" ref (15) but mainly, all parties need to work toward, and signal reliably that they are working toward, stable equilibrium. Being an unreliable partner must be met with brutality, even at the cost of everyone.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655390
(2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
(3) Hank Paulson, Dealing with China. We, and specifically, Goldman Sachs, and specifically Hank Paulson, taught Xi how to win. https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superp...
(4) https://merics.org/en/tracker/how-bri-shaping-global-trade-a...
(5) https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/us-revives-wwii-era-pacific-ai...
(6) Manchester. The Last Lion, the 3 volume definitive biography of Churchill, which puts the Prof's work in the largest possible context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lion:_Winston_Spencer...
(7) Jamie Holmes. 12 Seconds of Silence, the definitive story of the proximity fuse, a significant portio of Merle Tuve's unique contributions to the war, and the story of the founding of Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory. https://www.amazon.com/Seconds-Silence-Inventors-Tinkerers-S...
(8) Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Note Merle Tuve also plays a critical role in this narrative, not bad for one of those 'second rate' government labs. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
(9) Rocco Casagrande and the work of Gryphon Scientific, alas (but probably net good) acquired by Deloitte. Wayback has some of their reports: https://web.archive.org/web/20240228103801/https://www.gryph...
(10) Senior Colonel Ji-Wei Guo, and his theory of Merciful Conquest, audaciously published in the US's own Military Medicine journal https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19813351/ see also https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/weaponizing-bio...
(11) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. This Berkeley professor uses innumerable real world examples to illustrate how dictators effectively control their populations https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
(12) James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. UC Santa Cruz professor uses several extremely large examples the illustrate other ways governments control their resources. Spends a lot of time on the negative effects but certainly acknowledges the net upsides usually seem to outweigh the net downsides, but it would be good to learn how to avoid downsides when you can: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
(13) Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Most interesting passage to me was the dinner with Obama where Jobs told Obama the manufacturing jobs are never coming back. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648...
(14) H.R. McMaster https://www.twincities.com/2020/10/16/h-r-mcmaster-u-s-forei... also https://www.amazon.com/Battlegrounds-Fight-Defend-Free-World...
- The best thing I read this year was "The Last Lion", a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill.
I don't know that I would recommend it to most people, it's a hell of a lot of words to read about one guy: volume 1 alone is 850 pages in hardcover, covering 1874-1932. The writer (William Manchester) is also very fond of his subject, so those who consider Churchill a villain (or even a deeply flawed hero) will likely not care for it.
But man, could Manchester write. This is history as literature. He's especially good at long, dramatic, paragraphs that build to a crescendo over hundreds of words and close with a flourish.
The last volume was finished by another author after Manchester died, so it isn't as good.
- I'm in the middle of it right now. It definitely doesn't suffer from pop-history. I also read Andrew Robert's Churchill biography and thought it was excellent. Not quite to the level of The Last Lion, but that's mainly because it's much shorter.
- If you're into historical biographies, I highly recommend The Last Lion by McMasters on Churchill. Really puts things into perspective about how close Germany came to owning Europe.
It's really 3 books, 5000+ pages, not a quick read but worth the effort.
- The LBJ series by Robert Caro stands head and shoulders above everything else.
Some other good ones, including a great series about Winston Churchill:
Mornings on Horseback - about Teddy Roosevelt by David McCullough
Truman - David McCullough
The Last Lion - series of books about Churchill. I forget the author.
All of Doris Kearns Goodwin books are excellent, as well. She's covered a lot of presidents.
- Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.
The Last Lion (Alone) by William Manchester.
